May 4 – 8, 2026
CERN
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An Energy-Efficient Data Centre with Heat recovery at Queen Mary University of London [Online]

May 7, 2026, 11:45 AM
25m
40/S2-C01 - Salle Marie Sklodowska-Curie (CERN)

40/S2-C01 - Salle Marie Sklodowska-Curie

CERN

115
Show room on map

Speaker

Dr Sudha Ahuja (Queen Mary University of London)

Description

Queen Mary University of London Data Center went through a major refurbishment with an upgrade of the facility with heat recovery technology, improving the energy efficiency while increasing capacity. The data center refurbishment ensured a long term home for GridPP cluster supporting WLCG workloads, and also for future projects such as HL-LHC, LSST, SKA. The cooling system uses hot aisle containment with in row water cooling and dry air coolers, recovering server waste heat via a water to water heat pump for university district heating, offsetting gas use while benefiting from increasingly low carbon electricity. Since commissioning, added compute and storage have increased thermal loads, validating cooling and heat recovery systems while building operational experience in scaling, monitoring, stability, and incident recovery. Updated energy, heat recovery, and carbon data show that high performance scientific computing can grow capacity while reducing carbon impact through integrated heat recovery and modern water cooled infrastructure.

Author

Dr Sudha Ahuja (Queen Mary University of London)

Co-authors

Alex Owen (University of London (GB)) Dr Daniel Traynor (QMUL (UK)) Daohai Li Dimitrios Toroz (University of London (GB)) Jonathan Hays (University of London (GB))

Presentation materials